When I used XP last night to upload some music I was warned of low disk space. I have 166MB free. This seems shockingly low when I have next to nothing on Windows just the minimum programs plus iTunes.

When I accessed Computer on Ubuntu it says 360 GB Hard Disk, 12GB File system. When I upgrade the Ubuntu distro every six months I notice that the previous distro is still on the boot menu. Is this making the Hard Disk space less and less each time by partitioning? I don't need or use the 'old' distros.

I would like to partition the Disk with only the current distro and XP. I am very nervous about doing so as I had such a drama installing XP. How would I go about this? Is it possible to delete the other distros on the boot menu or do I have to reinstall Ubuntu 11.10 in order to free up the space for Windows?

If you are upgrading, rather than reinstalling, you only have one distro. However, you will have several kernels, which is what you see in the boot menu. You can uninstall the older ones in Synaptic or the Software Centre.

nelz wrote:If you are upgrading, rather than reinstalling, you only have one distro. However, you will have several kernels, which is what you see in the boot menu. You can uninstall the older ones in Synaptic or the Software Centre.

Fire up Gparted in Linux and adjust your Linux partition. Then with the same program, increase the XP partition, or mark it for NTFS, so XP picks it up next time you boot into it. Commit the changes and have Gparted do its magic It'll report back when it's done.

I'd be more concerned over exactly where the space is going rather than 'fixing' it by giving it more with changing partition sizes. My first question would be what else do you have on that Windows partition? Space doesn't just vanish into the ether - something is filling it up... and as lousy as Windows updates can be, if you've given XP a reasonable amount of breathing room on its partition (15-20GB) Windows Updates shouldn't have chewed it all up.

How big is that Windows partition?

Have you got lots and lots of iTunes music on it? ALAC in particular will chew HDD space like it was going out of fashion. This is my main suspect in terms of HDD space vanishing...

Have you put any more RAM in the system? If you've got the Hibernation and Page files active and Page file is set to size control by Windows (the default) then putting more RAM in will make the Hibernate and Page files jump in size...

Are there any large .log or temp files hiding anywhere?

Do you have System Restore set to a large percentage of the partition?

Are there lots of "$ folders" in the \Windows\ directory? (They'll be hidden and compressed with NTFS compression - they're often left behind when Windows updates essential system files, as they're the cache from the install and the old version in case you want to uninstall the Windows Update... but if you aren't going to uninstall the Update, they're just chewing space)

May also be worth downloading something like CCleaner and giving it a run to see what it finds; it's usually pretty good at finding temporary files hiding in daft places.

There used to be a jolly good free programme for finding and removing all unwanted/unneeded .dll files in the days that I used to use Windows (98SE). The profligate way that M$ wastes you HDD space by not cleaning up after itself was one of my reasons for waving two finger at BG and changing to linux.
I am afraid I can not remember it's name but surely the freeware world must be awash with them.

Start Synaptic the usual way, then search for "linux" or "linuz". Mark all but the latest kernel version for purging, confirm your selection and have it do its job. Then search the menu for the option to clear the package cache, confirm again. If you regularly try out software, repeat the cache clearing on a monthly basis (or more frequent if you'd installed/removed a lot).

Oddly (perhaps), I have found that when upgrading *Ubuntu releases, old kernels can be left in boot, but because they are not part of the new system's package list, they are not shown in Synaptic.
In just such a case, I have deleted all the relevant files for the old kernels from /boot (there's usually initrd, System.map, abi and config files as well as vmlinuz), then run sudo update-grub.
But, as mentioned above, Synaptic should be the first port of call for deleting old kernels.